Something I hear often when suggesting to people that they might want to consider starting their philanthropic journey now is that they want to wait until they have more money and then focus on giving some away. Of course, in numeric terms being able to give away $100,000 a year…

The framing of life into 3 acts has been around for some time. In summary; · Act 1 is all about the foundations of life (education, relationships, starting and trialling career options). · Act 2 is more about building — your family, relationships, career and interests. · Act 3 is…

For those that read my Christmas Message last year (or the year before or any year before for that matter) the following has a new preface! However the rest is pretty much as in past years… Preface (i.e. the bit before the repetitive narrative) The reason I retell the story about my sister in this post each Christmas is to try to help others use this time of year to reflect on those that they love and realise that life is short and random. …

An edited version of this appeared in the Weekend AFR on Saturday May 15. This is the longer version….. Prior to moving to the US to work as a VP of a product group at Microsoft, in 1990, I had not spent any time thinking about the concept of philanthropy…

For those that read my christmas message last year (or the year before or any year before) the following is mainly just a copy and paste. I felt compelled to post it again — particularly after the terrible tragedies that many families have suffered due to COVID-19. However if you read this last year don’t feel compelled to read it again….I resend it really as a way to keep my sister’s memory alive so apologies if the repetition annoys some..

In as much as a dying canary in a coal mine suggested the air quality in the mine was deteriorating and would soon impact human life in the mine — so is the signalling of R&D expenditure for a country’s future economic prospects. We all know that technology is impacting…

The recently published AFR piece on the top 50 “givers” (philanthropic donors) over the last year provides a unique opportunity to try to calibrate perhaps just how “giving” our most wealthy actually are. I am not going to spend a lot of time in this post talking about whether wealthy…

I truly hope what follows is not some elongated version of “white guy goes to African nation in khakis, builds a school, takes photos with black babies and buggers off never to be seen again”. Although our trip to Uganda has many of these attributes (!) our family is trying…

It may seem self-serving for me to write about how the VC industry could absorb more money … however, I hope you might see that VC is a good proxy for the health of the startup industry more generally. More money in venture capital means more companies can be funded…